The Gospel reading for the opening Mass of the 14th Columbus Catholic Women’s Conference contained words that expressed a common feeling among the 1,900 women in attendance.
The reading was St. Mark’s account of the Transfiguration, in which St. Peter says, “It is good for us to be here” upon seeing Jesus with Moses and Elijah atop a mountain. Msgr. Stephan Moloney, diocesan administrator and vicar general, used that phrase to open his homily.
“It is indeed very good to be together in this place, physically and spiritually united in one another’s company,” he said. “Nothing is better than being together in person.”
The conference did not take place last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s event, on Saturday, Feb. 19, returned to Kasich Hall at the state fairgrounds and was livestreamed to several hundred women gathered at about a dozen parishes and in individual homes.
Speakers included Sister Tracey Dugas, FSP, of New Orleans; Lisa Brenninkmeyer, founder of the Walking with Purpose women’s Bible study; Janelle Foligno, wife of former Columbus Blue Jackets captain Nick Foligno; and Father Dave Pivonka, TOR, president of Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Sister Tracey focused on three aspects of the Virgin Mary and her role in everyone’s lives.
From the moment she was visited by the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation, “Mary was receptive to her call to be the mother of God,” Sister Tracey said. “Her receptivity makes her perceptive. She can see the situation with truth and wisdom.
“She also is a powerful intercessor. She sees a situation and can take it to the proper place, interceding with her Son, Jesus,” as she did at the wedding feast at Cana.
Beginning with that feast, “she calls her Son forth to mission,” as she does to us, Sister Tracey said. “She prepares the way for miracles to happen. We need to ask her to help us grow deeper in love with her Son and to be disciples.”
Sister Tracey noted that the wedding feast took place on the third day after Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River marked the beginning of his public life. The Book of Genesis says man was created on the third of God’s six days of creation. She said this is one of several parallels between St. John the Evangelist’s story of the feast and the creation story of Genesis that show the similarities and differences between the Old Testament Adam and Eve and their New Testament counterparts, Jesus and Mary.
“Eve, instead of accepting God’s word not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, allowed Satan’s words to be perceived wrongly,” she said. “She didn’t allow herself to accept God’s gifts in God’s time. Mary accepted God’s gift of His Son, but her acceptance was in a manner that allowed her to do things in the right way.
“Adam had two jobs – to tend the garden of Eden and to guard it against anything evil. But he didn’t rise up to protect the garden and Eve” and failed his mission, she said. “When we encounter Jesus in a garden, it is in the garden of Gethsemane, and there He accepts His mission to lay down His life for His Bride, the Church. This is the God Whom we worship, Who gave His life for us.
“I believe the Father is good, He loves us, He wills to save us, and each of us is on a journey to make that happen,” she said. “I pray that each of you become stronger and wish that you become perceptive to the presence of God, even in the problems that surround you.”
Brenninkmeyer spoke on the theme “Hallelujah Anyway!: Discovering Good Despite Anxiety,” encouraging her audience to deal with their fears and telling of her own problems.
“My husband, Leo, and I are the parents of seven children, four of them grown and scattered all over the country. You mothers know that the older kids get, the less you can control them,” she said. “Anxiety has slammed into my family more times than I can remember, although I pray constantly to avoid it.”
She said one of the goals of Walking with Purpose is to help women become what Pope St. John Paul II described in his 2004 visit to Lourdes as “sentinels of the invisible.” John Paul described such people as “witnesses of the essential values seen only through the eyes of the heart.” Brenninkmeyer said the sentinels’ mission is “to notice things others might miss.”
“There have been plenty of disturbances coming into my life where I’ve known the right thing was to call on God for help” rather than try to solve problems alone, she said. “In my family, I’ve experienced depression, panic attacks, anxiety, cutting, suicidal thoughts, sexual brokenness, psychologists, psychiatrists, medication, darkness.
“If you feel alone, you are not,” Brenninkmeyer said. “This life is a battlefield, and God’s servants face and accept battles. The life of a Christian is one of battles. Pope Benedict XVI said, ‘You were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.’
“I have said to God, ‘I plead you to rescue me from the battlefield.’ God has chosen not to rescue me from what I fear most, but to rescue me through it.”
She said that since the pandemic began, the rate of anxiety among the population of the United States has increased 400 percent, and anxiety has affected one in eight children and adults.
“The fear of anxiety is a big part of what our problem is,” she said. “People struggling with anxiety wait an average of six years for help. There is no shame in seeking help. Even Jesus accepted help on the way to Calvary from Simon of Cyrene. If He was willing to do that, why do we think we can make it by ourselves?”
Brenninkmeyer said anxiety should be welcomed when it occurs because it kicks in when we feel we are not safe, it is meant to be a sign of imminent danger and good can come from anxiety.
“Whatever you face, you do not face it alone,” she said. “God has gone before you knowing you will make mistakes and have bad luck. Things may go wrong, but He has fixed you for this, and you are not mixed up enough to interfere with what He’s doing. Lift your eyes to heaven, for at this moment, God has His eyes fixed on you. He is up to the job.”
Brenninkmeyer said anxiety “gets your attention, and when it does, God says, ‘Let’s dive in together and make a pilgrimage into your heart, to areas where you haven’t relinquished control.’ It frees God to do surgery on your soul.”
Mentioning several instances of anxiety in the lives of her and her husband, she said she has found great strength in the prayer “Jesus, I trust in You. Take care of everything.”
She concluded with several declarations. “I declare that God is near the brokenhearted,” she said. “That He sits enthroned and blesses His people with peace … that Christ is present with you … that you dwell in the shadow of the Lord … that this slight moment of affliction is preparing you for glory beyond comparison … that God has declared peace for you.”
Janelle Foligno said experiences dealing with the health of her and Nick’s three children have made her realize the expressions “God never gives us more than we can handle” and “Everything happens for a reason” are more than just clichés.
Their oldest child, Milana, 8, was born with a heart defect, has undergone two open-heart surgeries and multiple minor surgeries and is now a healthy girl. Landon, 6, broke his left leg in early 2019 and had to undergo extensive physical therapy, while Hudson, 5, has dealt with respiratory infections and spent 20 days on a ventilator.
She and Nick, who currently plays for the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins, both grew up Catholic in Sudbury, Ontario. She said her husband’s family, which also includes a father-in-law, Mike, who was a longtime NHL player, and a brother-in-law, Marcus, who currently is with the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, were more active in the practice of the faith than her own family, and that made a difference once she and Nick started dating.
“I’m grateful for my early lack of experience as a Catholic, because when I found faith, I really found it,” she said. “God was a priority in Nick’s home. They prayed before meals, spoke about what they were taught in church and openly brought God into their home.”
This helped her fight eating disorders as a teenager. “I ultimately realized controlling food was a way to make me feel in control of my life,” she said. “We try to make ourselves small compared to others and minimize our strengths.”
After describing her children’s illnesses, she said, “We could have asked why God was doing this but clung to our faith more than ever, with the help of supportive communities. I learned God gives us more than we can handle so we might cry out to Him and recognize He is there for us. He is our load bearer and rescuer.
“We question the idea that everything is for a reason, and sometimes we can’t determine the reason. In coming to just trust and believe the reason is there, we have become stronger as individuals and a family.”
She said her experiences with the eating disorder and as part of a positive body program 10 years ago in the Ottawa, Ontario schools have helped her teach Milana to love her body as a gift from God, and her experiences with her children’s health are teaching her the way to help others.
Because of everything she has gone through, “you learn to live with a sense of trust, a sense of peace that you know where your life is going and that God is there to listen to you and to help you,” she said.
Father Pivonka focused on the role of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives, using several scriptural references. “Ninety percent of this talk and of what I do as a priest is telling people what they already know,” he said.
“What is the greatest day of your life? It ought to be the day you were baptized, because as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, baptism is the gateway to life to lie in the Holy Spirit and gives us access to all the other sacraments.
“I invite you to live the life in the Holy Spirit which began when you were baptized. It’s impossible to live the life God has in store for you apart from the Holy Spirit, who stirs into flame that fire, that gift that was given to you, as St. Paul says in the Book of Romans, ‘not in a spirit of slavery, but in a spirit of adoption,’” he said.
Father Pivonka said Paul chose this phrase because under Roman law, a parent could abandon a birth child for any reason but could not abandon an adopted child because that child had been chosen.
“God knows everything about you but still chooses you,” he said. “He will never abandon you. Whatever the worst thing is you’ve done, the Lord chooses you in your brokenness, your shame. You are his beloved.”
The conference concluded with a Holy Hour led by Father Pivonka. Music was led throughout the day by singer Tori Harris Gray of Dallas and a backup band. About 45 priests heard confessions during the conference’s lunch break, which was preceded by a talk on reconciliation by Father Michael Hartge.
The master of ceremonies was Sister Ana Gonzalez, OP, of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, who is international admissions coordinator at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut and professed her perpetual vows in Columbus in 2001.
